The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
In conventional database systems, users access their data resources in one logical database. A user of such a conventional system typically retrieves data from and stores data on the system using the user's own systems. A user system might remotely access one of a plurality of server systems that might in turn access the database system. Data retrieval from the system might include the issuance of a query from the user system to the database system. The database system might process the request for information received in the query and send to the user system information relevant to the request. During this process, data may be transformed through various formats and protocols in the various tiers of the system: from XML or HTML text to Java Objects to relational data structures and back again. In particular the latter transition is known in the industry as the O/R (object/relational) boundary and is the subject of much developer headache and 3rd party development tool support (because the representation one uses typically in a procedural language like Java, for a complex object, is typically quite different from the optimal manner in which that data is stored and indexed in a relational database (which is the dominant location for enterprise data of this sort)).
Unfortunately, conventional 3rd party approaches to lower-level O/R processing do not support save operations performed in bulk, becoming inefficient if, for example, the number of items to be saved to the database system is relatively high.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques enabling an API of the database system to improve performance and provide greater robustness of the database system.
Furthermore, it is desirable to increase flexibility of user-provided code and save routines while maintaining robustness of the database system.